Hey everyone! This is my first post on reddit so forgive me if I make any errors. Also, I apologize, it's quite a long one. I'll include a TL;DR at the end.
I've worked at the same hospital for the past three years. I started in August of 2018 in their food service department, working my way to now being a scheduler for radiology. I started my scheduling job in December of last year under the promise of working from home when finished with my training. I was told this would take about 6 weeks, also giving time to get my computer put together from the IT department. No problem, I figured it wouldn't take me 6 weeks to be fully trained but I wasn't about to argue. I started the week before Christmas, so that week and the week after was just doing some basics with learning their system, meeting the new management for this department, and signing paperwork.
With the beginning of the new year, and about 3 weeks of training under my belt, I was left alone. The lead scheduler who had been training me started working from home again. There was no talk of if I had finished training, what more did I need, what I was doing right, etc. I truly thought she needed time at home to get paperwork ready and she would be back the following day. Boy, was I wrong.
I had figured most of it out by then, using the same system at my previous job in the radiology department as a receptionist, so the job wasn't all that new to me. However, there were new things I still needed to learn, including the insurance providers our hospital accepted, what to do when the patient's insurance was out of network, how to handle it when the patient had no insurance at all. I told my boss all of this and she agreed I'd need to be trained on this before I could start working from home.
After another 2-3 weeks of working alone and attempting to get caught up with the work load foisted upon me, and no end in sight, my manager decided I was going to be used as a fill in with another department. She asked if I would be willing to train in their OB ultrasound suite, scheduling and checking in their patients, to fill in JUST IN CASE the full time scheduler their needed time off or called in sick. That should I have been my second or third red flag at this point, but I had my blinders on and I was only focused on the carrot dangling in front of me that was working from home, so I agreed.
I spent some time here and there training with the scheduler who worked there, we'll call her Sue, but also the registration employee who currently filled in when Sue was off, we'll call her Mary. Now, at this point Sue had been sick with the rona, so I had been primarily training with Mary until Sue was cleared to come back, and once she did come back I trained with her for another week or so.
I thought after training that would be the end of it, I could get my insurance training and finally start working from home. WRONG. So wrong. My insurance training was put off for weeks. I begged to be trained, to get a packet of information, something, anything at all, and each time I asked about when my computer would be ready I was told “Soon! This week, next week at most!” or “It has been a long time, hasn't it? Well, I'll get the head manager involved, shouldn't be long now.”
Also, by this time, Sue had decided she no longer wanted to work in OB ultrasound and transferred to registration in the ER, so Mary and I were filling in 2-3 days every week, rotating back and forth which days. I was upset, being taken away from the job I was hired for to fill in for the job I didn't want with absolutely no say, all the while being promised to start working from home soon….until the managers decided I would no longer be able to work from home until they filled the position for scheduling in OB ultrasound, and I had to stay there until then. I was angry to say the least. The job I never wanted was now being forced on me, and the promise of working from home was dwindling before my very eyes.
After several long weeks of rotating back and forth from the job I signed up for, broken promises, and 8 hour long insurance training days I had enough. During this time I was also picking up the slack of the other scheduler who I was teamed up with, the days I was in my original job I was working twice as much to cover what she was not doing, which is why I ultimately decided to stay in OB ultrasound. I liked the job enough at this point, I could work at my own pace, the managers left me alone because I was in a different corner of the hospital, and the ultrasound techs I worked with were fantastic. Now, I know what you're thinking, “Why were you switching to this job if you could work from home??” And that, precisely, my dear reader is why I am leaving. I don't believe I ever was going to be working from home. There were so many broken promises on their end, dangling this possibility in front of me so I would do what they wanted of me, all the while never actually intending to give me a computer to take home. I won't even go into the fact that they forced me to take the same 8 hour insurance training meeting TWICE without including the essential registration training I specifically asked for multiple times.
After working in scheduling for OB for several weeks and ruminating over how angry I was, I began searching for a new job, and the first one I interviewed at hired me. Nearly a full dollar more an hour, way closer to home (I drive nearly 45 minutes both ways at my current job, this new job is less than 15 minutes,) and no weekends nor holidays. I gave my two week notice yesterday and I feel like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders. I will be getting paid out for all my PTO, totalling about 215 hours total, so I'm taking a week off in between jobs along with a planned vacation around the middle of May.
TL;DR – I was promised working from home only to have it ripped out from under me several times, so I gave up fighting it and started working at secure job in scheduling for OB ultrasound, only to be screwed over some more so I decided to quit.